The Magician's Tragedy
A cautionary tale for the hyper-cartesian mind.
Be warned~
The magician’s hell burns not with flame,
But with frost.
It is a cold, clean brilliance.
Untouched by grief.
Untouched by joy.
Where theory is throne.
Where the Word is worshipped,
But never
Made flesh.
Where knowledge replaces love.
And spirit floats,
Disembodied,
Estranged
From an aching world.
Above it all~
He hovers.
Detached.
Correct.
Enlightened.
His truth is the truth.
His path, the final spiral.
His vision,
The sole light
In the shadow of fools.
"If only they,"
He whispers~
“The others,
The lost,
The uninitiated,
Would kneel before this knowing,
Peace would rise.
Evil would vanish
Like fog
Before my morning sun.”
And thus,
He denies his own descent.
He will not enter
The pit
With his brothers.
He will not bow
To the blood
And the breath
And the birth-cry of God
In the dirt,
In the depths.
He will not bless
The mess
Of flesh and fire,
Of bread and breath,
Of wedding feasts
And the sweat of real embrace.
He will not touch
The sacred wound.
He will not touch
The sacred world.
This is his flood
Of abstract fire~
A blaze
That burns
Without light.
It speaks,
But does not listen.
It shines,
But casts no shadow.
Beware the brilliant one
Who has never bled.
He will offer you light~
But steal
The fire
That gives you life.
Poem attributed to Dr. Robert Moore, renowned Jungian psychoanalyst and scholar of masculine archetypes.
As a mind with ultra-rational propensities, one needs to be mindful of not falling into the intellectually seductive allure of the Magician archetype – the Great Mind that reigns supreme in the kingdom of Reason, yet devoid of Passion.
At a sufficiently advanced intellectual state, when the Mind is able to see and play with the finest contours of concepts, one comes to the realization that everything can be conceptualized, subject to the black furnace of sheer rationality and turned into a mental model ruled by perfect logic.
The Mind of the Magician can prove and disprove any argument, build unassailable axioms of truth, find an explanation for everything under the sun. The architecture of its projections is mathematically perfect, yet hauntingly cold.
“The magician’s hell burns not with flames, but with frost.”
The Magician believes he can escape the suffering of the world beneath him, standing at the top of his ivory tower. He lives with the unwavering conviction that cold rationality can overcome suffering, “elevate” man beyond the realm of emotions.
By deconstructing everything, including the greatest sources of conventional suffering, he finds his peace of mind; he finds the satisfaction of perceiving the pristine sharpness of his own brilliance, reflected in his mind by a thousand mirrors.
He says, “Every problem can be deconstructed logically,” and, through the act of surgical deconstruction, he dissipates the emotional charge that ought to be associated with the problem.
To him, love, grief, anger, joy, guilt, glory, are nothing but chemical states that can be recreated, suppressed, or transmuted with pre-identified cause and effect relationships.
The Magician, through the frost of absolute rationality, transcends human suffering, but traps himself into a superhuman hell.
Not a hell of fire but a hell of frost. A hell where physical pain is supplanted by metaphysical emptiness characterized by meaninglessness and absence of life.
He is an intellectual genius—but an emotional zombie.
The Magician doesn’t suffer, but he doesn’t live either.